Week 6, Video 8: Cognitive Obstacles To Mindfulness

What are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life?
This is surely one of life’s biggest questions, and a question that has interested many of our ancestors. Buddha famously gave up his kingdom in search of happiness. Several Greek philosophers (from Aristotle to Epicurus and Plato to Socrates) had their own views on what it takes to be happy. And of course, we all have our own theories about happiness too.
How valid are our theories?
Until recently, if you wished for an answer to this question, you would've been forced to base it on discussions with spiritual leaders. Or, if you were lucky, you could've based it on late-night (and perhaps intoxicant-fueled) conversations with friends and family. Happily, all that has changed now. Over the past decade-and-a-half, scientists have gotten into the act big time. We now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
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Although not mandatory, reading Prof. Raj's forthcoming book, titled If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? can help you review and assimilate the material covered in this book at your leisure.
For Coursera learners alone, the hardcover version of the book is available for a deep discount of 50%, plus shipping and handling. You can order the hardcover for 50% off by writing to Aaron at: Aaron@800ceoread.com. Please mention that you are a student of the "coursera happiness course" in your email.
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By taking this course, you will discover the answers to questions such as:
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By the end of the course, I expect students who have been diligent with the lectures and exercises to not just gain a deeper understanding of the science of happiness, but to also be significantly happier.

教学方

Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan

脚本

[MUSIC] Hola. Welcome back. When many of us think of mindfulness or its conceptual cousin, meditation, one of the first thoughts that occurs to us is that of not thinking. This funny cartoon from the New Yorker, which shows two monks in a meditative pose, captures this idea. In reality, mindfulness is not really about not thinking. Rather, it's about changing your relationship with your thoughts. Here is how Richie Davidson, who many people consider to be the pioneer of using mirror imaging techniques like fMRI to understand the impact of mindfulness on the brain, and to whom I had the pleasure of talking just a few days earlier, put it. This clip is really short, by the way, but I think that it's really worth hearing it directly from Professor Davidson himself. >> The goal is not really to get rid of our thoughts, it's really to become more aware and to change our relationship to our thoughts and feelings. >> So, as you just heard, the goal of mindfulness is not to have no thoughts, but rather to change your relationship with them. Specifically, the goal is to try and not get caught up in your thoughts, which happens when you judge, or categorize, or comment on a thought. So, the aim is to separate yourself from your thoughts and feelings, and other aspects of your mind, and to merely observe them as if you are observing, let's say, clouds passing by in the sky, or as if you were a guard at Buckingham Palace, merely observing the tourists without passing judgment or commentary on them, or getting entangled with them in a conversation. Some scholars refer to this notion of merely observing with the term bare awareness. Bare awareness means you're trying to be aware without getting caught up in your thoughts, feelings, etc. This idea of bare awareness is not just difficult to understand intellectually, I think it's pretty near impossible. The only way to see what it means is to actually experience it. Here's how Sam Harris puts it in Waking Up. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience. It is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. In other words, unless you actually start a mindfulness practice, you won't realize what it means to merely observe your thoughts and feelings. Because mindfulness is such a difficult concept to understand intellectually, and because most of us, and this might be particularly true for the smart and successful among us, want to first know what we're getting into before we're willing to try it, many of us are reluctant to try out mindfulness. And this leads to sort of a catch-22 situation, because we won't try mindfulness until we get to experience what it leads to first, and without trying it out first, we may never get to experience what this bare awareness, for example, is all about. This is perhaps why people like Terence McKenna and Sam Harris are supportive of this idea of using mind-altering substances like psilocybin to get a glimpse into bare awareness first. The idea is that once you get that glimpse, or what Chade-Meng, author of Search Inside Yourself, have called initial access. Of course, Chade-Meng himself doesn't refer to the use of mind-altering drugs in his book. You would be more willing to try out mindfulness. And if you do try out mindfulness, there's no doubt that you will, sooner or later, get to that initial access that Meng is talking about. Here's Sam Harris, again, talking about this in his own words. I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else--not speaking, reading or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness--one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. So the two cognitive obstacles that many of us face in giving mindfulness a try are one, confusing it with being thoughtless, and deciding that that seems too tough or weird, and two, wanting to understand the experience of bare awareness intellectually first before being willing to try it. This leads me to the third cognitive obstacle, which is one that Sam Harris alludes to in the quote that I just read, namely that the fear that it make take weeks, months, or even years before you get to glimpse what mindfulness can do for you, keeps us from trying it. I have to confess, by the way, that this was an obstacle that I myself harbored for a very long time and had to overcome. So what I did is that I decided that the only way to over come it was to sign up for a relatively intense meditation retreat, which is what I did in April of 2012. I went on a ten-day Vipassana retreat. For those who don't know what Vipassana is about, let me tell you it's a pretty demanding retreat. It's ten days of more or less nonstop meditation for about ten hours each day, beginning very early at 4:30 AM, which is when they wake you up, and going on to 8 PM. You also don't get to eat much. It's all vegetarian food and the dinner consists of only fruits. And on top of that, and this is perhaps the most difficult part, you can't talk to anyone or even meet their eye gaze, since that could trigger a nonverbal communication between you. So you have to maintain what's called noble silence, for all of those ten days. It's very tough mentally. In my case, I had a bunch of very valuable experiences including several glimpses into the state of bare awareness. So I can personally vouch for what Sam Harris is talking about. But, what I also know now, is that putting one's self through a ten-day retreat may not be necessary derive the benefits of mindfulness. As we heard from Professor Amishi Jha in the previous video, even a 12 minute mindfulness practice a day, can work wonders. Indeed, even a five minute practice may be enough. A study in the paper that you now seen on your screen found that a mere five minutes a day of mindfulness for five weeks increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex, a pattern that, as we saw in Professor Shapiro's talk, has been associated with positive emotions. So, to summarize this video, there are three major cognitive obstacles that we face in trying out mindfulness. First, we confuse it with thoughtlessness, when it is really about changing our relationship with thoughts. Second, we want to understand what mindfulness feels like intellectually, before we're being willing to try it. And third, believing that it'll take weeks, months, or even years before you experience any benefits. As we saw, none of these obstacles to trying out meditation or mindfulness is really valid. In the next video, I will turn to the final set of obstacles that we face, some of which could be obstacles that prevent us from sustaining a mindfulness practice after having started it. See you soon. [MUSIC]